The inaugural lecture by architect Michiel Riedijk is about the drawing in architecture. The drawing is inextricably linked to every aspect of the architectural discipline. It is both the instrument the architect uses while designing and the outcome of the design process, both design tool and end result. To reflect upon the nature and significance of the drawings is therefore by definition to reflect upon architectural design.
In support of his contention that the drawing is the architect’s raison d’être, the author produces a wealth of persuasive examples. From the thirteenth-century master builder Villard de Honnecourt through Renaissance architects Alberti, Vignola, Palladio and Scamozzi, the early nineteenth-century rationalist J.N.L. Durand and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris down to Josef Albers’ Vorkurs at the Bauhaus and the architectural course devised by Hoesli, Rowe and Hejduk at the University of Texas at Austin. Riedijk concludes his tour d’horizon in Delft, where architectural education is strongly oriented towards the simulation of professional practice. Against this he offers the power of the imagination. Imagination, he argues, is indispensable if an architect is to respond successfully to the social task with which he is confronted in daily practice.

Riedijk, Michiel, De tekening. The drawing. De bestaansreden van de architect. The architect’s raison d’être. (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009)